shawn wang y.x.

Richard Branson’s Screw It, Let’s Do It: Lessons in Life and Business

By Swyx on August 11th, 2009

Dyslexic Billionaire. Maybe Speaking Isn't that Important?

Notes: Richard Branson is a terrible speaker. See Link (http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_branson_s_life_at_30_000_feet.html) He is reckless, irrational, and not above breaking the law. He shoots from the gut and never thinks twice. However he is undoubtedly principled, daring, honorable, and, even if he successful because he is lucky, entirely responsible to his employees and customers as he is to his shareholders (himself). An interesting man who has led many lives, but not a life I would recommend repeating.

Preface: The Bigger Picture

1. Just Do It!
2. Have Fun!
3. Be Bold
4. Challenge Yourself
5. Stand On Your Own Feet
6. Live The Moment
7. Value Family and Friends
8. Have Respect
9. Gaia Capitalism
10. Sex Appeal
11. Be Innovative
12. Do Some Good
13. Pow! Shazam!
14. Think Young
15. Epilogue

Quotables

Preface: The Bigger Picture

“When I was starting out in life, things were more certain. You had a career lined up, often the same one your father followed. Most mothers of course stayed at home. Today nothing is sure; life can be one long struggle. People have to decide on priorities if they want to get anywhere. The best lesson I learned was to just do it… If you look ahead to the end, and all the miles between, with all the dangers you might face, you might never take that first step.”

1. Just Do It!
   1. My mum Eve is a perfect example of this. When the war started, she wanted to be a pilot. Instead of brooding and dreaming, she went to Heston airfield, close to where she lived, and asked for a job to get her foot on the ladder. On asking what her chances of flying were, she was told only men could be pilots. This didn’t deter her – in fact, if anything, she looked on it as a challenge. She got one of the instructors on her side and he told her to disguise herself as a man. She got hold of a leather flying jacket, hid her blonde hair under a leather helmet and practised speaking with a dep voice. And she got the job she wanted.
   2. After the war, airlines were a new business opportunity and Mum dcided she wanted to be an air hostess as a means of seeing the world. But back then, air hostesses had to speak Spanish and be trained as nurses. Soon, she was an air hostess.
   3. I started Student when I was fifteen years old and still at Stowe, the boarding school I went to. I didn’t do it to make money – I did it because I wanted to edit a magazine. It didn’t occur to me that businessmen could come in all shapes and sizes and backgrounds because, until then, they mostly followed the expected formula.
   4. A bonus was the operator sounded like a secretary: “I have Mr. Branson on the line for you.”
   5. Jonny and I spent almost two years writing hundreds of letters trying to sell advertising space until I suddenly got the knack of how to sell the sizzle. Our final total for ad space for our first issue was 2500 pounds – which would enable us to pay for a print run of 30,000 copies. It was an incredible achievement for two sixteen year old schoolboys, when the price of an average house was 3600 pounds and an E-type Jaguar cost 1867 pounds.
   6. As we sat around tossing ideas for names into the arena, someone said, “Well, you’re virgins at business. What about Virgin?”
   7. Our system was simple: we looked in person for a busy street where a lot of people walked and we insisted on a three-month holiday from rent.
   8. The Day after we had won the Blue Riband, a Swede named Per Lindstrand telephoned me. “If you thought that crossing the Atlantic by boat was impressive, think again. I am planning to build the world’s largest hot-air balloon, and I’m planing to fly it in the jet stream at 30000 feet. I believe that it can cross the Atlantic. Do you want to join me?”
   9. “I’ll never understand all the science and theory,” I said, “but I’ll come with you if you can answer me this one question.” “Of course”, Per said, stiffening his back in readiness for some incredibly challenging question. “Do you have any children?”
2. Have Fun!
   1. Everyone wants to be a millionaire. I always tell them the same thing. I have no secret.
   2. Groups like the Beatles had made music videos, but as promotional tools separate from the big popo shows, like Top of the Pops, they were still rather thins on the ground. Our video got a lot of airplay, but a big breakthrough was to get it used as the soundtrack of the Exorcist.
   3. I went to Jamaica, partly as a holiday, but I also intended to look for bands and sign them up, so I took a suitcase filled with money, because Jamaican musicians won’t take cheques.
   4. I had spent all my cash on signing up bands in Jamaica, but I had heard that if you were looking to buy property in the Caribbean you would get a grand tour, free of charge. I phoned an estate agent in the Virgin Islands, telling him that I owned a record company and wanted to buy an island to build a recording studio on it.
   5. When we got to the airport, the flight was cancelled and people were roaming about, looking lost. No one was doing anything. So I did – someone had to.
   6. Even though I hadn’t a clue what I was really doing, with a great deal of aplomb I chartered a plane for $2000 and divided that by the number of passengers. I borrowed a blackboard and wrote on it: VIRGIN AIRWAYS. $39 SINGLE FLIGHT TO PUERTO RICO. I got two free tickts out of it and even made a small profit!
3. Be Bold
   1. I enjoyed making the TV series in the US, The Rebel Billionaire, because I had fun with a range of challenges, many of which were straight from James Bond films. The final episode had a twist at the end. I offered the ultimate prize-winner, Shawn Nelson, a cheque for $1 million. There was a catch. He could take the cheque or toss a coin for an even bigger prize. If he lost the toss, he would lose it all.
      1. All or nothing. It was a huge gamble. He asked me, “What would you do, Richard?” I said nothing. He had to make up his own mind.
      2. “I’ll take the cheque,” he said. Taking the cheque out of my pocket and giving it to him, I said, “If yo uhad gone for the coin toss, I would have lost all respect for you.” He had made the right choice by not gambling on something he couldn’t controll. He got the million dollars and the mystery prize, to be president of Virgin for three months.
   2. I’ve always said that you don’t need to do a lot of expensive research, or produce vast files and reports to know if something is a good idea that will work. Mostly, you need common sense and vision.
   3. The money to start an airline was less than a third of a year’s profits. I pointed out that even if we lost the two million pounds, we would survive. “It’s not too big a risk. And it’ll be fun.” They winced. They weren’t happy with the word “fun”. To them, business was serious.
4. Challenge Yourself
   1. For me, there are two types of challenge. One is to do the best I can at work and home. The other is to seek adventure. If you challenge yoruself, you will grow, your life will change, your outlook will be positive. It’s not always easy to reach your goals but that’s no reason to stop.
   2. “Ricky wants to have another go at winning that ten shillings,” Mum said.
   3. The top of the balloon was caught by the fast current and took off like a rocket. It was flying along at a crazy angle at 115 miles an hour. The capsule was still going at 25 mph.
   4. We had been warned that at 43000 feet the glass dome of our capsule would explode and our lungs and eyeballs would be sucked out of our bodies.
5. Stand On Your Own Feet
   1. “If you want milk, don’t sit on a stool in the middle of a field in the hope that the cow will back up to you.”
   2. I lost faith in myself only once, and that was in 1986.
      1. By then, Virgin was one of Britain’s largest private companies. I was told I should go public. I felt we had been badly let down by our bankers. The sole reason for their disapproval seemed to be because I had started Virgin Atlantic and it was only recently that Skytrain had gone bust in a very public way. My manager came to see me with the bad news: they were pulling the plug. My best option seemed to be to go public.
      2. The day that Virgin became a private company again was like landing safely after a record attempt in a powerboat or a balloon. I felt nothing but relief.
6. Live The Moment
   1. The sky is one of the most peaceful places I know. Nobody can phoen you, nobody can stop you. You are free. You can fly along side a wild swan and hear the beat of its wings. You can look into the eyes of an eagle.
   2. I am so aware of how precious time with my family is, I ration myself to only fifteen minutes of business a day when we’re together. Many bosses ask, “How can you do it all in just fifteen minutes?” I say, ” Make every second count.”
   3. The Spanish painter, Dali, had a unique way to savour the moment. He would pick a perfect peach, warm from the sun, holding it in his hand to admire its golden skin. Closing his eyes, he would sniff it, breathing in deeply as its warm perfume filled his senses. Then he would take a single bite. His mouth would fill with the luscious juice. He would savour it slowly. Then he would spit out the mouthful and throw the peach into the sea below. He said it was a perfect moment and he gained more form that single unrequited bite than from gorging on a basket of peaches.
7. Value Family and Friends
   1. I was shocked when I sat down at my desk – a marble tombstone – at the Crypt one day, to find a memo to the staff from Nik that he had left there by mistake. It said that they should sack me as editor and publisher and turn Student into a co-0p.
   2. When the government abolished the Retail Price Maintenance Agreement – the cartel that fixed prices – record shops didn’t cut p’rices. I instantly saw a gap and ran an ad for cut-price mail-order records in Student. The response was incredible.
   3. I told him that we only had one rule. “The Andy Williams Rule,” I said with a straight face. “You’re never to stock Andy Williams.”
8. Have Respect
   1. One of the best lessons I ever learned was when I did something illegal. I got caught and paid for it. I thougth I was being a bit of a longhaired pirate. I thought I was being bold – but I was also being foolish. Some risks just aren’t worth it.
   2. I made a total of four trips to France, pretending each time that the records were for export, and turned right around again as soon as I landed on French soil, before even going through their customs.
   3. My headmaster’s words came back to me. “Branson, I predict that you will either go to prison or become a millionaire.” I wasn’t a millionaire – but I was in prison.
   4. Customs agreed to settle the case by fining me a sum equal to three times my illegal profit. It came to a massive $45000 but they said I could pay it back at the rate of 15000 a year. My way of restoring my own respect was to pay back every penny without moaning. In fact, I gained.
9. Gaia Capitalism
   1. In a very short space of time most of the Earth will be uninhabitable.
   2. Part of our resistance to change is due to evolution. Our brains are good at perceiving danger in the form of fangs and claws and spiders and fire. It’s more difficult to alarm with grave dangers that can only be perceived after it is too late.
   3. Henry Ford and Rudolf Diesel never intended cars to use gasoline. When Henry Ford told a NYT reporter that ethyl alcohol was the “fuel of the future” in 1925, he believed it. “The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumac out by the road, or rom apples, weeds, sawdust – almost anything,” he said. “There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There’s enough alcohol in one year’s yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years.”
   4. Unbelievably, not only was Henry Ford’s first Model-T built to run on fuel made from hemp, but the car itself was constructed from hemp. Popular Mechanic magazine wrote in 1941 that the Model T was grown from the soil and had hemp plastic panels whose impact strength was ten times stronger than steel. Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, designed it to run on vegetable and seed oils like hemp. In fact he even ran it on peanut oil for the 1900 World’s Fair.
   5. If the Feds hadn’t banned hemp crops in the 1930s instead of petrol, cars might have still been running safely and in an environmantelaly friendly way on marijuana. Now there’s a thought for the old hippies of the world.
10. Sex Appeal
    1. Freddie said to me, “Richard, I know you’re not actually that good at public speaking, but you’ve got to get out there and use yoruself to try to put Virgin on the map. Try to make sure you get on the front pages, not the back pages.”
    2. One day, I was walking throught the office when Ashely Stockwell, brand marketing director of the Virgin Group, suddenly produced a camera and snapped a close-up of my eye.  Philippe showed us the the complete collection of remarkable logos he had designed for the Galactic project, based around a nebula, combining a human eye with its pupil. With a smile, he pointed to the blue one. “That’s yours, Richard.”
    3. I want Virgin to be the coolest brand on the planet and for that, I’m prepared to dangle in the buff over Times Square, fly over Everest in a balloon, or find myself on a bunjee 100 feet below a helicopter in a skydiver position, to be landed among 100 buxom and beautiful female lifeguards on Bondi Beach to promote Virgin Blue. (It’s not all tough.)
11. Be Innovative
    1. I was promptly expelled and my parents were told to come and collect me. i knew they would be upset, so ,thinking fast, I wrote a suicide note and on the envelope said it wasn’t to be opened until the next day. I gave it to a boy I knew was far too nosy not to open it at once.
    2. I have always believed that nothing is set in stone; the System is not sacred.
    3. On 10 June 1986, BA ran a promotion to give away 5200 seats for travel from New York to London. Immediately, we ran an ad that said, “It has always been Virgin’s policy to encourage you to fly to London for as little as possible. So on June 10 we encourage you to fly British Airways.”
12. Do Some Good
    1. One of the ways we tried to help people our age was to start the Student Advisory Centre, somewhere anonymous and friendly, staffed by student volunteers who were on the same wavelength and understood the problems. My inspiration was born out of need, when one of my girlfriends needed an abortion.
    2. The man who started IKEA divides his day into ten-minute sections. He says, “ten minutes, once gone, are gone for good. Divide your life into ten-minute units, and don’t waste even a minute”.
    3. the boss of BA said, “Who the hell does Richard Branson think he is – part of the bloody Foreign Office?”
13. Pow! Shazam!
    1. SpaceShipTwo can carry either six people or the equivalent weight into space for only the same CO2 output as one business-class passenger from London to New York.
    2. I have a cameo role in the latest Bond movie, Casino Royale, alongside a Virgin Galactic plane; and in the new Superman (alongside a vViergin Galactic spacecraft). The producers said they wanted to bring Superman in to the modern era using Virgin rather than NASA.
14. Think Young
    1. Young people in Africa are desperate to gain an education, so much so that one or two of them have hitchhiked 1500 miles to get to CIDA.
    2. Dont lead sheep, herd cats. It’s easy to herd sheep, but impossible to lead them from the front. Cats on the other hand are independent and intelligent and those are the kind of people we want to employ at Virgin.
    3. At the beginning of 2006 the Pentagon was voted 125b a year over ten years to pay for the war in Iraq. To compar, the annual cost of raising African health to world standards (30b); educating every child in the world (7b), clean water and sanitation worldwide (9b), dealing with HIV/Aids worldwide (10b). Put into perspective, does making war make sense?
15. Epilogue
    1. I never once said, “can’t”. I went for it, and I did it.
    2. I spend a third of my time promoting, a third on new ventures, and a third on fighting fires. I would like my legacy to have created one of the most respected companies in the world. Not necessarily the biggest.
    3. Everyone needs to keep learning. Everyone needs goals. Go ahead – just do it. The best of luck to you, and have fun along the way.